What If You Retired on Bitcoin in 2013, 2017 or 2021?

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In HODL or Fold, you retire with $500,000 of Bitcoin in any month since 2013 and live through the real prices from there. I ran every one of those start months through the game's own code, all 155 of them, to see what history actually did to a Bitcoin retirement.

The short version: when you retired mattered far more than how you lived. And the most expensive thing you could do was sell in a crash.

The setup

Each game starts with $500,000 of BTC at that month's closing price. You spend a fixed amount each month, rising 2.75% a year with inflation, and sell coins to pay for it. There are three lifestyles:

The start months run from January 2013 to November 2025, so every game lasts at least a year. Prices run to early November 2026.

In the first year those budgets take 7.2%, 12% and 19.2% of the stack. That's roughly two to five times the 4% that the classic 4% rule allows. By the usual stock-and-bond rules of thumb, all three are far too high.

Almost everyone made it

Doing nothing but holding and spending, here is how many of the 155 start months ran out of money:

That looks like a great result for a 12% withdrawal rate. It needs two warnings.

First, it covers an extraordinary run. Bitcoin closed January 2013 at about $20 and is around $77,000 now. Retire in January 2013 on $3,000 a month and the game says you'd have about $1.8 billion left today. Nobody should plan on that happening twice.

Second, "made it" means "hasn't run out yet". Someone who retired in 2021 has had five years. Someone who retired in 2013 has had almost fourteen.

The month mattered more than the budget

Look at 2017, at $5,000 a month. Retire in January and you'd have about $35 million today. Retire in December, eleven months later, and you'd have about $58,000, roughly nine months of spending at today's prices.

Same year, same budget, same rules. The only difference is that December 2017 was the top of a cycle, and January came before the price rose about 14 times.

2021 is worse. At $5,000 a month, not one of the twelve start months is back to $500,000 today. March 2021 has about $8,000 left, less than two months of spending. On paper it survived. In practice it's done.

The 19 Lambo games that ran out all started at or soon after a peak: late 2013 to mid-2014, late 2017 to early 2018, and ten of them in 2021 and early 2022. Retire near the top, and every month of the bear market that follows costs you more coins, just when they're worth the least. I wrote more about why in Bitcoin cycles and retirement timing.

What the choices did

The game stops at the big moments (the peaks, the crashes, COVID) and lets you choose: hold, sell half, buy back, or spend 25% less for a year. I played every start month with each lifestyle, 465 games per rule, using a few simple rules.

Spend 25% less for a year whenever a crash headline came up. This never came out behind plain holding, and came out ahead in 410 of 465 games. The gain was small: the typical game ended only 2% to 5% better off. But for the Lambo lifestyle it cut the games that ran out from 19 to 10. Less spending near the bottom means fewer coins sold at the worst prices, which is the same thing the lean spending article found on the simulator's price paths.

Sell half at the first crash and never buy back. Behind plain holding in 435 of 465 games. The typical game ended with about 40% less.

Sell half at every crash and buy back at the next big high. This is the classic panic-then-FOMO pattern, and it did the most damage. It finished behind holding in 457 of 465 games, and the typical game ended with about 80% less. At $5,000 a month, 13 games ran out instead of one.

Sell half at every high and buy back at every crash. The hindsight strategy. It finished ahead in 452 of 465 games, with about 3.6 times as much as holding. It also needs you to know which headline is the top and which is the bottom, while it's happening.

That last one is why the game has a blind mode. It hides the dates, the dollar prices and the real headlines, so you only see "New high" or "Crash" and a multiple of your starting price. Timing the market gets a lot harder when you can't remember how the story ends.

Now run it forward

History says $500,000 of Bitcoin at $5,000 a month nearly always made it. The simulator's price paths are less generous, because they assume each cycle grows less than the last.

That matches what's happened so far. The peaks went from about $1,100 in 2013 to almost $20,000 in 2017 (about 18 times), then about $69,000 in 2021 (about 3.5 times), then about $126,000 in 2025 (under 2 times).

$500,000 at today's price is about 6.4 BTC. At $5,000 a month rising with inflation, it lasts:

At $8,000 a month, it's about 5.6 years on Conservative and about 13 years on Baseline.

So the lessons from the past travel better than the returns. Starting near a peak hurts. Selling in a crash hurts more. Spending a bit less when prices are down helps a little, and it helps most when it matters. How big the next few peaks are is the part nobody knows.

Try it yourself

Play HODL or Fold in blind mode and see whether you'd have held through 2018 or 2022 without knowing what came next. Then put your own numbers into the Bitcoin retirement calculator and see how they hold up on each price path from today.

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Not financial advice. This article is for educational and informational purposes only. The simulator's results rest on assumptions about future prices that may not hold. Do your own research and consult a qualified professional before making financial decisions.